Exposé: a simulated children's hospitalization to sabotage a polio vaccination campaign | Pakistan

PESHAWAR: An attempt to sabotage the polio vaccination campaign across the country was revealed when a group of conspirators simulated the illness and hospitalization of children in the village of Mashokhel for Sowing panic and misinformation about the campaign.

In the videos that circulate on social media, one can see a man asking young boys dressed in the madrbada uniform to lie on hospital beds and pretend to be in the room. to be unconscious.

In another video, the same man spreads lies about false and unfounded death of children due to polio vaccination.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government on Monday launched a three-day anti-polio campaign in which thousands of polio workers were sent to schools and madrbadas to administer the oral polio vaccine to children under 10 years old. five years.

In the middle of the countryside, about forty children from a village school in Mashokhel were brought to the hospital with complaints of diarrhea, nausea and headache. As news of the alleged child illness spread like wildfire in and around Peshawar, panicked parents began to send their children to the hospital.

Lady Reading Hospital, Khyber University Hospital and Hayatabad Medical Complex were quickly flooded by anxious parents who brought their children.

Although the authorities badured that the polio vaccine was completely safe, enraged locals broke down the main entrance and set fire to the Mashokhel hospital in Peshawar.

The police arrested the man who spreads lies in the above videos and launched a crackdown against 12 other suspects accused of vandalizing property and sabotaging the anti-polio campaign.

Kamran Afridi, coordinator of GeoNews' Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI), said: "There can be no reaction to the polio vaccine, the vaccine has not expired and the condition of all children is normal. "

Afridi added: "The doctors also said that the children had not reacted to the vaccine.There are parents in Mashokhel who do not want to administer the drops to their children and they could have become sick for d? other reasons. "